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Post by malifer on Mar 12, 2012 10:22:07 GMT -8
I found the podcast because one episode was tagged Swords & Wizardry thinking a review would happened, I listened. S&W was barely mentioned, but the podcast was excellent.
I have started listening to the backlog mostly in order, but have skipped around a little. In order I'm up to S2 Ep 08.
But I found the Adventure Structure Overview in S5 Ep 14 and Then Part II: Linear and Retro-linear in S5 Ep 18.
Did this ever get more Episodes?
Because I really dig these but really wanted to hear tips for running Event Driven and Multi-Branch Free Form.
Also Sandbox tips.
I once tried to run a Sandbox in 4e with novice players. I was the only Pen & Paper grognard. The group had a couple of adventures under their belts and players were from an MMO background. When I took the DM reins so the new DM could get a chance to be a new player and I threw them in a Sandbox/Free Form style adventure it was a disaster.
They were deer in headlights. They were looking for the railroad tracks.
So tips how to get new players off the railroad Linear would be welcome.
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HyveMynd
Supporter
Dirty hippie, PbtA, Fate, & Cortex Prime <3er
Posts: 2,273
Preferred Game Systems: PbtA, Cortex Plus, Fate, Ubiquity
Currently Playing: Monsterhearts 2
Currently Running: The Sprawl
Favorite Species of Monkey: None
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Post by HyveMynd on Mar 12, 2012 16:29:42 GMT -8
I'll second this. I've really enjoyed the Adventure Structure episodes and am eagerly looking forward to the others in the series.
Like malifer, I'd also like to hear a discussion on how to get players to stop looking for the railroad tracks and start making their own. I have a pretty experienced player who says he enjoys narrative games but just kind of sits there waiting for the rails and hooks to appear.
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Post by jazzisblues on Mar 15, 2012 6:10:34 GMT -8
I"ve been thinking about this a lot lately and the idea of a total sandbox is a bit troublesome for me. I don't disagree that as a goal the players through their characters should drive the game. That said, I think as the gm one should (at least) be prepared to lead them to the sandbox and throw some toys in for them.
I'm not talking about railroad tracks, rather more along the lines of, "Hey guys the sandbox is over here."
I've said many times that what I try to do is throw out plot hooks for the players and see what sticks and then we run with it.
Anyway, just my 2 krupplenicks worth, your mileage may of course vary.
JiB
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Mar 15, 2012 21:05:45 GMT -8
I once tried to run a Sandbox in 4e with novice players. I was the only Pen & Paper grognard. The group had a couple of adventures under their belts and players were from an MMO background. When I took the DM reins so the new DM could get a chance to be a new player and I threw them in a Sandbox/Free Form style adventure it was a disaster. They were deer in headlights. They were looking for the railroad tracks. So tips how to get new players off the railroad Linear would be welcome. I think player objectives have broadened since playing in the late 70’s early 80’s when cowboys and Indians was a common past time and RPGs were a shared fantasy adventure. It depends on the group cohesion certainly. I played RPGs with other kids from my neighbourhood back then and now I play with a hodge-podge of strangers from a range of divergent cultures spanning America to Venezuela. Still, I remember my cowboys and Indians days to have been a less argumentative- and a more collaborative-style play, meaning that when a guy got shot he stayed down until the next game and didn’t complain about it often. We didn’t need paint pellets and it worked fine. The evidence I have seen at my gaming table these days represents players who are adversarial, enjoy exposing “system” (or DM) weakness, and/or fear following a storyline. Battle mats are absolutely necessary for these players. Now that depicts players in my pool who are tabletop RPGers (and usually computer gamers) since 2000. Veterans. Our “new” players are people our ad attracts and speaks to them this way: come play a story game with other friendly expats in someone’s private home. These newbies arrive with a different attitude. They get character sheets given to them based upon a standardized group intake interview, serving to familiarize both the GM with the players and the players with the world and what’s in it. They do not have the same broad objectives as the RPG players: new players work together; visualize better; approach rule debates with respect to gather more information about rulings; and show more interest in storylines overall. And something else I find curious to note. RPG players make a character back-story immediately. Sometimes as long as 3,000 word essays. As DM, I never ask for more than a name and a general idea of where on the map they come from at level 1. The new players never even think to make a back-story. The RPGers begin the game by telling their stories through meta-game exposition. The new players play their stories through the game, which can include me asking for a back-story after 3 levels and using it as a hook or episodic adventure down the road. We’re a lonelyhearts type group, for lack of a better vivid descriptor of expats away from all we know. A long tale that gets longer in the telling (and never ends) suits the gathering of new players. It provides a continuous soap opera that new joiners can hook into. The RPGers in our member pool prefer episodes and demand quick level/power ups. So, my observation of these players jives very much with the deer in the headlights, free form style adventure as disaster with players whose experience reaches only as far back as 2000. These players have broken away to form their own group. I play in their group and simply roll dice, and try to pick off any players who might be attracted to the RPGers but are a better fit for my lonelyhearts group before they get discouraged from RPGs. This is just my observation from one pool of 20 people over the last 2+ years. But I have seen much written – usually by OSR boosters – that reflect the same dearth of the player-type with whom I like to play. It seems, to me, that players no longer have what it takes to play RPGs in a collaborative, visual style of on-going storytelling. YMMV, and I hope it does, but I need to share my sadness at what I see – like the 70’s American Indian and the highway of garbage. On Saturday I start a new game in the other group as an Assassin character. I will have no back-story. In fact I will play with a Ranger character sheet. However, the other players have already told their back-stories and how they are badass Paladins. The GM has warned me tonight that, rather than role-play a conflict situation at the table that can arise were I am discovered within this group, I will have to roll another character. The warning he gave me is despite the fact he, too, admits he would like to see how the group deals with one very capable, useful party member who is different than the others. Alas, if the players are anything to go by, their characters will leave my assassin to form a group of their own. My conclusion from personal observation is that dynamic story telling is dying within the hobby since 2000. Anyone have any thoughts how to combat this? Maybe, as Gary Gygax writes, I shouldn’t play with them. I am doing okay on that score. But my observations hold true with similar observations from OSR grognards (who are not expats), which suggest the death of the hobby won’t be run on the rails of the model train industry but on the death of player imagination, a collaborative team spirit and dynamic storytelling which is at least on par with a cowboys and Indians game. Any thoughts here? Is it just a matter of an adventure structure I can’t grok? What's your opinion? Can an adventure structure solve this so everyone can sit at the same table?
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Post by jazzisblues on Mar 16, 2012 6:42:17 GMT -8
Interesting comments creativecowboy I'm not going to quote the whole thing as that would be silly but I do have some thoughts and observations.
Back in the early days of gaming we didn't have many of the tools that we have now. Game systems were not as evolved and as thoughtful as they are now. 0th Edition and 1st Edition were very primitive constructs compared to the things we have now. This thought has been in my mind a lot lately as I'm writing a 1st Edition game to run at GameX in May.
Also, when we were 13-14 our desires for our games and our understanding of the world were both much narrower than they are now. As the father of now grown, children most of whom are gamers, their understanding of the world is much broader than mine was at their age. (Despite how worldly and wise we thought we were at the time.) I blame the internet and the media but that's a different topic.
I do think that most people who come to tabletop rpgs from the world of mmos have a VERY different understanding and a very different set of aims and objectives for their gaming experience. I think this is reflected in the way they describe characters and is shown in the 4e rules in particular where they have adopted the standard mmo roles as descriptive terms for characters. Namely: Striker, Controller, Tank ... etc. In my career as a gamer we never used those terms to describe a character. I'm not saying they're bad, just a different perspective.
I think it's a pretty safe assertion that mmos are a shallower implementation of the idea of role playing but in all candor I think that's a limitation of the medium more than anything. I'm a software developer by profession and one thing I can promise you is that a computer is NEVER going to do what you want it to. It will comply if you ask it to do something that it understands, but bear in mind that computers when you boil everything else away are machines that do precisely two things. They count and they remember. Everything else is an illusion created by someone like me and they are only able to carry out the instructions that they are given.
As always just my 2 krupplenicks on the subject, your mileage may of course vary.
JiB
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Post by malifer on Mar 17, 2012 17:53:00 GMT -8
I'm not talking about railroad tracks, rather more along the lines of, "Hey guys the sandbox is over here." I agree. I don't expect the players to throw away my plot hook and build a tavern instead. However they very much come from a video game background. They kill the monsters, poke the dead body for clues, then go to the next room. It has a little more roleplaying than Hack & Slash dungeon delves of long ago. Honestly I would it put on par with Super Nintendo Final Fantasy II. The players will go find the quest, then complete the quest. The End. I don't expect thespian acting nor do I want a to play Elders Scrolls Morrowind where the PCs will collect spell components for hours, but I would like to nudge the group to Bard's Tale 2003 direction where they interact with the world a little more and they make decisions that change the experience they will have. The adventure I ran wasn't a true sandbox. It was a published module. It had a fairly linear main storyline and a large central location full of different NPCs with their own motivations and beliefs. The colorful NPCs and side quests were numerous and gave it a dash of sandbox. There were different ways to get to through the adventure's main plot. The trouble came when the party talked to about 4 NPCs got a red herring quest and took off to enter the super dungeon of death. Now I get that the super dungeon of death is appealing, but it was seriously a bullshit side quest I want to say it was some Dwarf lost his Battle-Boar or some silly shit. There were plots hooks scattered everywhere in this place and the first NPC that had one was good enough. There were mysteries, clues, and backstabbing NPCs. Only thing is most of the story was in the town. The could find stuff in the dungeon, but since they didn't know the story behind it, the stuff just became loot.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Mar 18, 2012 13:46:33 GMT -8
I was writing a thoughtful comment here, gathering my thoughts and re-reading JiB's post and I think he has hit upon something almost profound. My job was corporate conscience: image and governance issues. I know about behavioural conditioning and how even verbal repetition forms behavioural habits. I would use the simple English word manipulation, but that would make most of my professional colleagues swoon. But that's exactly what I spent my brainpower on for many years. As a GM, I also use hooks.
But using hooks, or manipulation, is extremely difficult in this situation JiB describes: "a computer is NEVER going to do what you want it to. It will comply if you ask it to do something that it understands, but bear in mind that computers when you boil everything else away are machines that do precisely two things. They count and they remember. Everything else is an illusion created by someone like me and they are only able to carry out the instructions that they are given."
Malifer, you describe players who may not be wired for your style of tabletop RPGs fun. They are programmed differently. Possibly even hardwired by ingrained routines at and away from tabletop RPGs. And your game may even cater to their preferred responses. You spring a story on them; the hard disk makes that grating whine; and there is a faint smell of burning plastic.
How to take away player agency so the players are comfortable zombies yet the DM enjoys a game rather than a railroad? You can always make a bunch of vanilla NPCs who stand on every street corner rain or shine and cry out – like in video games for example. Of course, while the characters are so automated in this bug fix the players get left for dead. “They are only able to carry out the instructions they are given” so drop the red herrings.
I am not so sure I would even want to socialize with such Muppets to be honest but that’s exactly where I definitely need another perspective as a DM. I concur whole-heartedly with Gary Gygax’s advice about picking players with whom to play. That means, the way I see it now, I would not qualify myself to DM your group. But the difficulty may be more than just the DM here. I guess that means, without other resources to back you, it’s pretty well unhackable. I couldn’t hack it.
I grew up at a time and place where sandbox play was part of my daily programme: hide and seek, cowboys and Indians, army men on the floor with voices in-character, creative writing, etc. Your RPGers may not understand what it means to “go out and play” especially if one of the bastions of sandbox play, role-playing, is affecting programming that is foreign to the very concept at its core.
Those are my thoughts at the moment.
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Post by malifer on Mar 24, 2012 6:00:11 GMT -8
Malifer, you describe players who may not be wired for your style of tabletop RPGs fun. They are programmed differently. Possibly even hardwired by ingrained routines at and away from tabletop RPGs. And your game may even cater to their preferred responses. You spring a story on them; the hard disk makes that grating whine; and there is a faint smell of burning plastic. How to take away player agency so the players are comfortable zombies yet the DM enjoys a game rather than a railroad? You can always make a bunch of vanilla NPCs who stand on every street corner rain or shine and cry out – like in video games for example. Of course, while the characters are so automated in this bug fix the players get left for dead. “They are only able to carry out the instructions they are given” so drop the red herrings. I grew up at a time and place where sandbox play was part of my daily programme: hide and seek, cowboys and Indians, army men on the floor with voices in-character, creative writing, etc. Your RPGers may not understand what it means to “go out and play” especially if one of the bastions of sandbox play, role-playing, is affecting programming that is foreign to the very concept at its core. Those are my thoughts at the moment. I think fault may lay with my inexperience "teaching" game to people. My old group was certainly from a time when we were younger and Cowboys and Indians was still fresh in our minds. But as with age people grow older and a stick is no longer a lightsaber or Tron motorcycle it's just a stick. So I don't want to say that my new group isn't wired that way, it's just that they haven't experienced the types of games I have. So tips on teaching new people to game would be just as useful.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Mar 24, 2012 7:39:20 GMT -8
So tips on teaching new people to game would be just as useful. Well, I do have new people so here's what I got, though your mileage may vary: I recruit people without discussing mechanics or system. I say "Dungeons & Dragons" even if I want to play Cyberpunk 2020 to use RPGs brand only as a touchstone to get people comfortable. "It's a game where people get together to wear personae in a story told collaboratively around a table. Experience world shaking life and death events together from the comfort of your chair surrounded by friendly people." I do an interview with them. In D&D, I have a written standardized questionnaire to score alignment (stolen off the web) and questions that direct me to offer the type of class a player wants to play. I do not ask: what do you want to play? I do not open a rulebook though I have PHB and DMG handy IF someone wants to look at it for the first time. (It's my way of saying: yes, Virginia, there is a legitimate game to be played.) I ask about class philosophies and stick to cliché. Cliché is my friend. I stop cliché when it gets boring for the players not for me, the old Grognard. I get into the story and cliché is a good way to get everyone to level 2 or 3 where the story can really begin. I erase the wall between player and character knowledge. Players will grok this on their own. In fact, I have one game where everyone starts playing without a character sheet. The interviews are complete by this meeting and I have made a character sheet for each and everyone at the game BUT the start has them all together on a journey starting from today's current date. They’re wearing what they got on at the table, have what they have in their pockets. I asked them what they would pack on a journey during the interview – some of which is marked on their character sheets. They interact together and a few things happen where we roll dice and then they crash land in D&D - the only survivors from the travel. A wizened healer heals them and acts as an oracle for beginning knowledge of the world. They get handed stuff (which they did not choose but is cliché for the character, and I have filled out as possessions on their sheets) and this is the first time they see the sheets. The healer, in character, explains what he understands to be AC, BAB, etc… He uses stories as reference same as I would at the table – except I am using props and holding a broom handle as I talk. Maybe they want to find a way home or maybe not. I also do Blue Booking, which is VERY TIME CONSUMING. Some players never return after the Blue Booking. That decision saves me at the game table. The players who do return to the “big table” generally feel freer creatively at that table. I stay away from the battle mat even though I bought one. I have to write scenes out to read them clearly – particularly traps – so that everyone can share the imagination. It’s not good to innocently omit a piece of information at the table. I am hoping this writing will become less and less as I progress and players are forgiving of my occasional errors of omission. I am wrestling with the notion to keep RPGers away from my group. I am a hypocrite on this issue I know. I think the most important thing is to make sure no one disrupts the group's creative flow. I cannot assess individuals until they interact. So I should probably man-up and bar RPGers from first time players even though that is harsh. But if I have a great bunch of people who role play, "I will do a maneouver for X result," but another camp of player who clarifies to rules or referees the action for the other players (requiring me to be DM at my table and break immersion) then the best thing is to eject the RPGer. I keep in mind the Bible reference at 1 Corinthians 5:6 www.watchtower.org/e/bible/1co/chapter_005.htm : “Do YOU not know that a little leaven ferments the whole lump? 7 Clear away the old leaven, that YOU may be a new lump, according as YOU are free from ferment.” I mean, hey, if the wisdom of Christ is good enough for many, why not for me? Still, I like to think Gary Gygax’s advice is the original here: just get rid of them. The valid reasons he cites for game excommunication have expanded in the post 35 years. Note, I am not saying there is an un-crossable chasm between new players and WoW-RPGers. But I do recognize there are different games and different people are entitled to game differently. Fun is not a universal concept though everyone likes to have fun. I just want to avoid the clash of the titans at my table because my definition of fun includes warm fuzz feelings between people that stem from a sense of belonging. These are just from my experiences for what they're worth. I hope you find them useful. Your mileage may vary – as it should at every tabletop where the GM rules.
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Post by uselesstriviaman on Mar 24, 2012 8:58:06 GMT -8
I'm almost afraid to ask, but what's Blue Booking?
One of my greatest pleasures is introducing new players to this hobby we all love so much. I start 'em out simple - I introduce them to the base races and classes, with brief explanations, and let them choose for themselves. After they've chosen, we roll up stats and assign 'em. Then we walk through their class/racial abilities, feats, and skills. Once they've got all that done, they get to buy stuff.
After character creation is finished, we jump right into the adventuring. Combat is learned as we go, and I have some great experienced players who can also help out the n00bs when needed.
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Post by CreativeCowboy on Mar 24, 2012 10:41:43 GMT -8
I'm almost afraid to ask, but what's Blue Booking? Blue Booking can take two (2) forms that Iam aware of... one is just a rap session. You talk out the character's past. There is no chance of character death and no dice rolled. What I do is actually bring preferably two players (often strangers) together a few days after they have gone through the interview character generation. I run a simple story railroad that leads the new player into the path of the group: find the wagon, investigate the strangers (the big table party), go to find a mentor, go to sell your junk to start a new life, etc. . There is a chance of death in what I do because it is current story. The investigate the party Blue Book had the new player actually go down fighting a giant wasp. We stopped the game at that point and I invited her to the big group; and the big group walked into the scene just as the action was happening. I narrated what was happening (already played and rolled in the Blue Book) and the players came to the rescue. Then I had the new player, having been healed, introduce herself. The group did not know it was the new player until they healed her character and she spoke for the first time.
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